When building a new venture, it can be helpful to look to others who have successfully maneuvered the entrepreneurship path. You can study which of their strategies worked and which didn’t and also invest yourself in their personal stories, drawing inspiration from all they have achieved.

Here are three inspiring entrepreneurs who have been in the news lately:

1. Theresa Alfaro Daytner: Daytner was named one of the 10 most powerful women entrepreneurs by Fortune Magazine, and her business acumen was recently praised by President Obama at the 2010 Most Powerful Women Summit.

Obama described how Daytner raised six children and cared for her aging parents while securing capital to start a business through a home equity loan. Daytner says she chose entrepreneurship when she realized that “the traditional career path of the corporate world did not share the same family values and creative resourcefulness that I was so passionate about.”

Daytner Construction Group has made $16 million so far in 2010.

2. Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin: Starting on the first of this month, Eckersley-Maslin began an international 12-day journey including stops in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, as he strives to build the smallest multinational in the world.

Eckersley-Maslin is working on behalf of the Oneforone Group, which “gives people a socially conscious choice when making a purchase by donating a similar product on a one-for-one basis to an individual of need in an impoverished local or international community.”

By the way, this challenge comes after Eckersley-Maslin started up a successful business earlier this year — in one week using $500. You can follow his journey at SmallestMultinational.com.

3. David Gelernter: This past week, Mirror Worlds, a tiny tech company founded by Yale University professor David Gelernter, was awarded $625.5 million in a verdict against Apple for patent infringement for software features Cover Flow flip function, the Spotlight hard drive search tool, and Time Machine. Apple is challenging the decision.

Gelernter has been a champion and pioneer of technology for decades, literally having written the book on how computer software could change our lives in 1992: Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.

Gelernter is also a survivor of a mail bomb attack by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski, a strong opponent to technology.

Who are your favorite entrepreneurs? From where do you draw entrepreneurial inspiration?